infolibre

Wednesday, February 06, 2002

Since 1990 the Nordic mobile library people have met every fourth year for a festival, arranged alternately in different Nordic countries. Previous festivals have taken place in Sweden 1990, Denmark 1994 and Norway 1998. Each time there have been at least 300 participants and dozens of book mobiles. The record was 505 participants from 14 countries and 68 mobiles gathering in Denmark! Now it is Finland's turn to host it for the first time. Turku is expecting around 300 guests from various European countries and at least 60 mobiles.

Monday, February 04, 2002

Joseph Ishill emigrated to the United States in 1909 and settled in New York City. Having been apprenticed in a print shop in Rumania, he found work as a typesetter in the city. An anarchist by the time he came to the U.S., Ishill soon began attending the lectures of Emma Goldman and other notable radicals. He was a frequent visitor to the Ferrer Center in New York, and when a Ferrer Colony was founded in Stelton, N.J. in 1915, Ishill was one of the original members. Ishill began helping print the Colony's magazine, The Modern School, and a year later he published Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. From the publication of that book in 1916 until his death fifty years later, Ishill published more than 200 books and pamphlets, all of them typeset and printed by hand. In spite of toiling in relative obscurity he has been lauded both by radicals, who recognize him for his efforts in publishing radical materials, and by fine press enthusiasts, who consider him to be one of the finest American printers and typographers of the twentieth century.

Two academics delve into the archives (and the ground) to uncover the story behind a potter's field being engulfed by suburbia . . .

On various visits to the field, the professors noticed dozens of evenly spaced depressions in the ground, the size and shape of coffins. After the thaw last spring, skulls, pelvic bones and jaws with teeth emerged from the earth. "I picked them up like you would seashells on a beach," [scholar Susan] Stessin- Cohn said. "There were just bones everywhere. It was pretty weird. I didn't know where to store them. I couldn't keep them in my car — what if someone stopped me? I put them in my laundry room, and it freaked me out all weekend."

Via the New York Times (registration required). In the same vein is this story, about a Scottish librarian who has uncovered the appalling history of a Victorian women's
hospital.